Chapter 21
As much as Amelia liked Mary, she wouldn’t want her to know where she and Adam were staying, so I gave Mary James’s address and went to fetch Amelia. I needed all of them, together.
Gas lamps cast my shadow over the cobblestones, broke it apart, and put it back together as I made my way to Shoe Lane.
Amelia answered my knock immediately and pulled me into a hard embrace. “Thank God you’re all right. I’ve been imagining the worst.”
“It is the worst,” I said. “Maggie took Sarah to make me do her dodge.”
“Oh.” Amelia stepped back, the fingers of her right hand coming to her mouth. “God, Kit. I’m sorry.”
“I can’t do it the way Maggie wants,” I said. “I need your help. Can you come with me to James’s? Mary is already there.”
Amelia handed me a lit lantern and plucked her coat from its hook without a word.
The fog was thick, turning the gas lamps into yellow blurs, smaller in the distance.
As we walked, I told her about Maggie’s plan, concluding, “I know too much. Likely she’ll kill me once she has the gems, so I can’t rat her out. ”
“Or take over the ring,” Amelia said. “You’re the only choice, if enough of you wanted to break away. Although even she needs to give some thought to how many bodies she wants to rack up.”
“She could frame me instead.” I stepped over a pile of sodden newspaper.
“Hide one of the diamonds in my room and tip off the police. Have an eyewitness say I killed the constable. She’d get her revenge, two of the diamonds, and me hanged into silence.
But my best guess is she’ll have Billy kill me afterwards.
Not least because once Sarah is safe, she has no guarantee I won’t go for revenge myself. ”
Amelia nodded soberly. “She lives by revenge. She wouldn’t be able to imagine you don’t.”
“Even if Sarah and I left Southwark.”
“You’d need to leave London, Kit. I told you she found Adam. Even if she’s caught—even if she’s in jail, she has reach.”
An ache hard as a pebble formed in the back of my throat. The thought of leaving Amelia and Mary—and James—
“But first, you need to take this dodge in hand,” she said. “Get her what she wants, but do it safer, yeah?”
I swallowed down the ache. “I know. I just need to think on how.”
We paused at a corner, and church bells doled the half hour, muted by fog, as we crossed the cobbled road.
“Maggie was shrewd, choosing you.”
“Because I’m a capable thief or because I work at Ardle’s shop?” I asked.
“Because you have a sister you love that she could use,” Amelia replied. “I daresay she caught on to that early.”
I felt a pang of self-loathing at my stupidity. “Because I mentioned Sarah the day we met, in the goods room.”
“Don’t take yourself to task,” Amelia said. “She’d have found out soon enough because she was looking.” Her voice grew harsh. “She’s like a bloody magpie, gathering up bits of information.”
“At least I’m sure Sarah’s alive.” For now, I added silently, though I immediately squelched the thought.
“Do you have a good map of Hatton Garden—I mean one that shows alleys, passageways, and such?” Amelia asked.
“No.”
“I can get one. But I need about half an hour.” I opened my mouth. “Don’t argue, Kit. It’ll save us time in the end. Then we’ll go to James’s. When did you last eat?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Don’t be stupid,” she retorted. “You’ll be no good to us if you can’t think. We need you to have your wits about you.”
It was almost a relief to hear her scold me.
She took me to a pub, sat me down, ordered a bowl of stew and some ale and said, “I’ll be back in half an hour, likely less. Don’t leave without me. I don’t know where James lives.”
I nodded. “All right.”
A family entered the pub and took seats at a table nearby.
It was late, and my guess was they’d just arrived by train from somewhere and wanted supper before bed.
Or perhaps they were waiting for someone to come.
It was a mother, a father, a boy of about thirteen, and a daughter a few years younger, talking and joking together.
The serving maid brought four bowls of beef stew and a loaf of bread.
The father ate ravenously, and I guessed he was a dockworker, from the size of his shoulders, bulky as an ox’s, and the roughness of his hands.
When the mother finished her stew, she began knitting by the table’s lamplight.
The boy, with his brown hair flopping over his forehead in spears, was explaining something earnestly to his father.
The girl lined up beads along the crack between the wood slats of the table, chattering to her mother, who paused in her knitting to look and admire.
Into my mind slipped a fragile trace of a memory, of me sitting beside my mother at our table.
I’d been allowed to play with the buttons from her button box while she sewed.
I placed the shining bits of shell into squares, grouping similar ones together.
My mother was embroidering an apron with blue thread, and I must have asked her why, for I remember her words, in a voice that was mild, even indulgent: Well, there’s no harm in making it pretty.
Yes, there had been moments when Ma showed me her better nature. It was Ma, after all, who had shown me how to sew with patience.
Why did I resist those memories?
Even as I wondered, the answer came: Because they showed me what might have been. I’d had it for a time, and I was keenly aware of the loss.
A sudden thickness formed in my throat and I choked it down with another bite of stew.
I’ve no use for people who feel sorry for themselves.
But I couldn’t help wondering, what would Sarah’s and my lives have been like if my father had been like that man, if he’d never broken my mother’s heart?
Or if my mother had always been like this one?
What if there had been more kindness, more affection, more loyalty, more family feeling?
Then again, wouldn’t I have been different? I wouldn’t value those traits nearly so much if they’d been handed to me, regular each day as bread. Why would I?
But I’d done my best to give them to Sarah, as often as I could.
The thought of her in some dark hole, ill-fed and cold, made me push the stew away. I sent up a small silent prayer that she wouldn’t give up hope. Perhaps this was the silver lining of our parents’ failures. They had cemented Sarah and me together in a way that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
I gulped the ale, feeling the cold of it down into my belly.
True to her word, Amelia reappeared in twenty-three minutes by the mantel clock, her gloved hands empty. I gave her a questioning look, and she tapped her pocket.
Together we made our way to James’s lodging house.
Mary had already told James enough that even before we reached the doorway, James had flung it open, and he stepped forward to pull me fiercely close.
I clung to him for a moment, relieved that his feelings ran as deep as mine.
He drew back and I saw the disbelief and anger hardening his face.
“Is she bloody mad?” The skin around his eyes tightened, and he shook his head. “Kit, love.”
Over his shoulder, I saw Mary with surprise on her face, and I flushed and pulled back.
“I’m no ‘love,’” I said shortly. “I was a fool, not to guess Maggie would use Sarah to force my hand.”
James stepped away from the threshold so Amelia and I could enter and shut the door behind us. When we had shrugged out of our coats, he said, “Start at the beginning.”
And so I did. With three pairs of eyes on me, I told the whole thing—beginning with Maggie asking me to assess Hatton Garden, the reason for marking this jeweler, and the dodge she’d drawn up, omitting only the fact that Tim Lowry might have been Mary’s father. There was no reason to share that here.
I concluded, “I made Maggie swear to give me Sarah when I brought her the three gems and the story broke in the papers—and I think she’ll keep that promise, even if I don’t use her dodge. My thought is, I need to get what she wants, without killing anybody, before Sunday.”
“Spike her gun,” Amelia said.
I nodded. “But I’ve no idea how.”
“That’s what delayed us.” Amelia unfolded the map and placed it on James’s wooden plank table. “I had to fetch this.”
James brought two lamps, resting them near the corners, and stood beside me. Opposite, Mary and Amelia bent over the map with us.
“I don’t know how you could get into Simonson’s off the street,” Mary said. “Cathy told me there was another theft in the Garden two nights ago. They’re keeping it out of the papers, but there’ll be even more constables now.”
“And you can’t go in at the roof. I looked last night,” James said. “Too steep, and it’s slate. It’ll be slippery if there’s any rain or mist at all.”
My eyes flicked sideways to him in surprise.
He gave me a look. “You honestly believe I’ve been thinking of anything else since you told me?”
“Besides, the family lives above. They’d hear for certain.” I gazed at the map. “What about tunnels or passages from St. Etheldreda’s or other buildings?”
“But that would still require going into buildings off the street,” James said. “I think I have something better.”
“What?” I asked.
“This is the Fleet, coming down at a diagonal from King’s Cross.” His finger traced the river, slowly so we could follow, running from Euston Station southeast along Gray’s Inn Road to Blackfriars Bridge.
“But that’s too far west of Hatton Garden,” I said. “By at least a quarter of a mile.”